Supercomputer's Intelligence Doubled

The University of Louisville has doubled the power of its supercomputer. When it was installed in 2009, the Cardinal Research Cluster was 21 teraflops, meaning it could do 21 trillion calculations per second. Most home computers aren’t measured in flops, but rarely exceed a ten thousandth of that power. Now the cluster is 42 teraflops. It’s used for cancer research and the new capacity will be used for pediatric cancer and environmental research.

“It’s been up since July 1 and we are already topping out,” says Vice President of Information Technology Priscilla Hancock. ”They already are filling up this expansion, so we will need to start looking for other grants to continue to do this. How do you turn away from doing something like cancer research?”

IBM helped the school with the upgrade. It cost $1.8 million and was paid for with a grant from the federal Health Resources and Services Administration.